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Comment by tostitos1979 | Hacker News Reader

tostitos1979

It is not as simple/obvious as you may think it is. It depends on what the goals of the govt are. If the govt is trying to encourage progress on cancer drugs, they can certainly give grants to stimulate that research direction. If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money. The govt can of course fund a new lab that does cancer research. It can choose to make all IP that comes out of this lab public. I think in the former case, there is a bigger multiplier effect/leverage from the same amount of money (without the IP restriction).

You need to realize that IP is an artificial monopoly granted by the govt for a purpose.

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I don't think that the OP doesn't understand what "intellectual property" is, they just disagree with the assessment that it's necessary (or maybe proper) for the government to grant private monopolies on scientific knowledge.

You need to realize that people can know what IP is and still disagree with you.

Maybe the OP understands what "IP" is, but it seems they do not understand the economics of research or why IP is still applicable to publicly funded research.

If one knows the concept of IP but not why it's needed in these situations, one is still arguing from a position of incomplete understanding.

I understand IP very well, and I disagree with the whole concept.

Here I'm just making a point at how stupid the system actually is. As I stated, the government gets rights to use patents funded by taxpayer money, but the taxpayer has no such rights. The government here is actually nothing but a mediator of funds from taxpayer to researcher, yet it acts as if it paid for the research out of it's own pocket.

Frankly, I am against patents but I understand why they are there :)

"If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money."

And why is that a bad thing? If they have an idea that they think they can make a lot of money by patenting, they're going to do that research anyway with non-government funding (e.g., start a company and raise venture capital). So why waste taxpayer money funding it? Better for the government to fund something like basic scientific research that's not patentable (and on which applied research depends).

There are a lot of misconceptions about research in your questions, but suffice to say that in most research, the vast majority of "ideas" don't pan out. In fact, a lot of research is so risky that no entity short of the government will invest in it. That may seem like a "waste of taxpayer money", but without taking a very long view, truly groundbreaking advances won't come about.

>In fact, a lot of research is so risky that no entity short of the government will invest in it.

Government is actually incredibly bad at funding risky research because in the end it is accountable and needs to show some level of result. Even the moonshot had concrete goals and mileposts that needed to be met or else the whole thing was called off.

Meanwhile, there's this crazy guy who discovered something incredibly risky that many of his peers didn't believe was true and did it outside of the government:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell

I guess any investor would want returns on their investments.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell*

I never said "all important discoveries come from the government". The Polio vaccine and penicillin and the theory of evolution and the last Nobel Prize for Graphene and a bunch of other things came out of non-government funded research.

That has no bearing on the fact that most of the biggest advances cannot be had without significant long term investment without guaranteed outcomes that most private investors are extremely unlikely to fund. I mean, have you seen the sort of research proposals professors write that actually get grants from the NSF?

Beyond things like DARPA and NSF and the like, think of things like the various National Labs. Nobody's winning Nobel Prizes every year at these labs, but year after year they do work that pushes the boundaries of human knowledge to enable future discoveries.

You're conflating Private with 'for-profit'. Private includes entities that are nonprofits, like Janelia Farms, or, in the case of Mitchell, Glyn Research Ltd. American Cancer Society, American Heart Society etc. also give out very interesting long-term, high risk grants.
Yes, I have seen some of the shit that professors write for the NSF, and I'd rather they not be using taxpayer money to fund their intellectual masturbations, or hiking trips to the rainforest, or scuba diving expeditions (among other travesties).

The viewpoint "if the govt pays for it, it should be free" ... doesn't sound right to me. Let me offer why. This is equivalent to saying, if you raise VC funding, the VCs should get all the wealth you create since they put up the money.

A VC can choose who they fund and under what terms - most importantly, they can choose not to fund something. The same isn't true for taxpayer funded research - it's money that government has forcibly taken from people to fund some arbitrary research in which the taxpayer has no say whatsoever.

I was with you until you said "arbitrary research in which the taxpayer has no say whatsoever". The people on the NIH/NSF/whatnot panels are as a rule very aware of their duty towards the taxpayer and do their best to allocate the scarce funds to whoever deserves them most.

The taxpayer had no say in whether he wanted his money stolen so that some other guys can decide who can waste much of it. I was making it clear that this is nothing like a VC model, which is voluntary. If we were to make the comparison, it would be that people could chose themselves what research, if any, to fund.
The issue with panels allocating taxpayer money, is that their interest is still in government. That is, they will fund research in which government has an interest or is neutral, and consequently, any research which is potentially harmful to government is scrapped (even if it would be beneficial to the taxpayer.)
One might not think there's a distinction between what benefits the government and what benefits the taxpayer if one believes in the fairy tale that governments exist to benefit the people.

The people on the NIH/NSF/whatnot panels are as a rule very aware of their duty towards the taxpayer and do their best to allocate the scarce funds to whoever deserves them most.
Really? Am I really reading this?
Were the panels doing their duty when they awarded Felisa Wolfe-Simon her grant? Was the panel doing their duty when Leo Paquette, sitting on one, kaiboshed a young researcher's grant and stole the idea for himself? How about the panel that awarded a grant to Geoffrey Chang, in spite of having six retractions due to careless (and quite frankly stupid) crystallography? Is he really "someone who deserves it the most"? This is just the tip of the iceberg. I could list about 20 more off the top of my head.
I would go so far as to say as a rule they do not allocate scarce funds to whomever deserves them the most.

"If the govt said if you get even 1 cent of grant money from us, you can't patent your drug. Well .. few researchers will take that money"
I doubt that -- researchers do not have many sources of funding available to them. Grant money basically dictates the direction of research in the majority of fields. Grants come with all kinds of annoying strings attached (in grad school, I was once paid from a grant that specifically forbade us from purchasing desktops or laptops; we could, however, purchase rack mounted servers) and researchers still take them.
What you need to understand is that researchers are usually more interested in padding their CVs than in getting patent rights. A professor trying to get tenure needs to bring in grant money, publish papers, and graduate some PhD students (who in turn need to be publish papers, etc.). There is not much room for turning down funding, just like there is not much room for pursuing lines of work that the government is not willing to fund.

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